It depends on how important it is to the stakeholders. Anything that generates enough emotion to cause a flamewar isn't going to have intelligent, civilised di

It depends on how important it is to the stakeholders. Anything that generates enough emotion to cause a flamewar isn't going to have intelligent, civilised discussion, so then you have to decide: - As the platform owner, do you want flamewars on your site? - As a participant, do you want to engage in fruitless, emotionally charged discussion that will inevitably go nowhere because of human nature? - Or is the topic too important to ignore? On HN, for example, dang has already made it clear that flamewars will be buried regardless of topic. I can respect that sort of compromise as a defence against the nastier parts of human nature in order to keep the site a step above 4chan and reddit, even if it's not the ideal of fairness.